Home>Products>Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings [Illustrated Slipcase Edition] by Ferdowsi
Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings [Illustrated Slipcase Edition] by Ferdowsi
$ 125.00
This new edition of the thousand-year-old classic work by Ferdowsi, one of Persia's greatest poets, is a prose translation of the national epic. It is fully illuminated with over 500 pages of lavish illustrations.
Like other great epics, Shahnameh is a chronicle of the human imaginative consciousness. It tells the long history of the Persian people beginning with the creation of the world and the origin myths of civilization and ending with the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. A mix of myth, epic tales, and history, Shahnameh takes the reader on heroic adventures filled with superhuman champions, magical creatures, heart-wrenching love stories, and centuries-long battles.
"The illustrations of this Shahnameh, while totally dependent on the art of the past, most closely evoke the fantasy literature of today in visual form. Thanks to the dramatic dynamism of Ferdowsi's epic, its contemporary interpretation in images is a vibrant feast for the imagination, making this a Shahnameh for the digital age." --Sheila Canby, Metropolitan Museum of Art
A little over a thousand years ago the Persian poet Ferdowsi of Tous collected and put into heroic verse the millennium-old mythological and epic traditions of Iran. It took him thirty years to write the sixty thousand verses that comprise the Shahnameh or "The Book of Kings." This monumental work begins with legends of the birth of the Persian nationhood and ends with the Arab conquest of Iran. Written in the aftermath of that national trauma, Shahnameh was meant to harbor the Persian collective memory, language, and culture in a turbulent sea of many historical storms.
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